 Our next conversation is entitled, Crafting to Do It Yourself Economy. It's good, our moderator, Matt Iglesias, is Slate's Business and Economics Correspondent. He actually has a book that is coming out on March 6th, so this is the eve. Matt has written a book about the building I live in, I assume because the title is, The Rent is Too Damn High. So I look forward to reading Matt's book about my building, and I'm sure it's more about the macroeconomics of our housing situation in the US. We're thrilled that Matt could join us. He's a terrific writer. He's been at Slate for a while now and we've done several events with Matt. Prior to that, he was at the Center for American Progress and I'm sure many of you follow him in social media and have read his blog even prior to his being at Slate where he continues to do great work. So Matt, the floor is yours. All right. Oh, wait. Yeah, dude, the wire is there. I've got a little microphone here, right? Does this work? Okay, excellent. So the title we've been given here is Crafting the Do It Yourself Economy, and I think the theme running through the panelists here is that nothing in economic life can truly be done all by yourself. By definition, if you're engaged in economic life, you're engaging with other people, with other customers, with other suppliers, things like that. So the question is, how can we make that work? If you're making things, if you're doing it yourself, how can you connect with the other people out there in the world who might need the services you have or who have the resources you need and what are the implications of a reshaped world around maker culture and do-yourself production? So with me on the far right is Cindy Awe, Community Director at Kickstarter, which is a great company in the crowdfunding universe. Then we have Bannon Garrett, who's Director of Asia Programs at the Atlantic Council and recent co-author of a report on Could 3D Printing Change the World? And Chad Dickerson is CEO of Etsy, which I'm sure is a company everybody knows, a marketplace for mostly sort of craft-oriented vendors, but other things as well. And to kick things off, I figure we should just sort of cut to the chase. Can 3D Printing Change the World? It can if you sell your 3D Printed Items on Etsy. No, but you know, I hate these reports with question marks in the titles, you know? Yes, no? Did you want me to? Because I'm not at the 30,000-foot level. I'm at the space station level of this. It's a non-techie. And then we're going to go down, you know? This is something that I've totally became really familiar with over a year ago, working with some people from Virginia Tech and we've been doing workshops at the Atlantic Council to try to bring together people doing technology and science with foreign policy people who generally know absolutely nothing about technology and the technology is going to shape the world that they are going to operate in. The people who had no clue about the internet and now find the internet totally ubiquitous, pervasive and has changed their world dramatically. So the idea is looking down the world 10, 20 years, but what might change your world and that you better know about and understand and maybe marshal these technologies to do things you want to do. So looking at 3D Printing, what you see from the back row level if you really play it out is it's a total transformation how we manufacture, you know, first time in a couple hundred years and it brings, it does many things. First of all, it would bring manufacturing back, not just home, but closer to the consumer that you produce where it's consumed and you produce what you want when you want it. You don't even produce inventories. You produce the product that you want on demand for the product and mostly what you're moving around the world then is not container ships full of goodies that are produced in one platform, but you're moving STL files around the world and producing the goods where they want and you're moving raw materials for the printer cartridges basically, you know, whether it's titanium or it's copper or it's plastics or ceramics. I mean, there's all kinds of materials being used now and they're gonna go a lot farther in terms of what's possible. And of course that we talked about today I think was so interesting, was I think so exciting about 3D Printing or additive manufacturing to use the more generic term for many different technologies here is that anything you can design basically you can print and every time there is absolutely no penalty for complexity. You make them, you saw some very complex items out there. It's no more difficult, no more costly to produce one of those. A ball within a ball within a ball, something that can't even be made by manufacturing traditional methods with machine tools. It's no more costly to do that than to make a brick. In fact, probably cheaper because you use less material. And so, and then every time you print you can print something different, unique. So there's one off customized printing and the same printer can be printing any number of products, right? So you can have various sized printers with different resolutions, different materials but within the parameters of that printer and its resolution you can print an unlimited number of products and every time it prints it's something different. Doesn't have to be the same thing. So this is a totally different manufacturing paradigm from big supply chains, make all the little parts, they're shipped to a big factory in China, Foxconn and you have thousands of people in an assembly line making the same thing by assembling those parts. What if you eliminate the supply chains, you eliminate the platform and you make the thing right where it's wanted and used and it can be customized to the customer because there's no cost to doing that. So it's really changed as the whole geoeconomics of how we produce. I mean, think of the fact of maybe moving over we're talking over a 10, 20, 30 year period, not tomorrow but to where more and more products are as I said are manufactured where they're needed, when they're needed, there's no inventories, there's no excess production. By the way, with 3D printing you don't, it has a very, very resource efficient. I think Boeing is now making titanium landing gears and in the past 95% of the titanium is just thrown away and it's all mixed with chemicals, it becomes useless and very toxic and all that. Now there's virtually no waste. You use the titanium powder and you make what you wanna make and this is true with all this. So if you think of a resource constrained world going forward and with another couple billion people on the planet and everybody wanted to be middle class, it's going to be very resource constrained. You're far more resource productive, more efficient in use of resources, far to get the same output in terms of people's needs and you're not moving goods all over the world in the same quantity so your carbon footprint is greatly reduced and so many from the environmental perspective, there's huge benefits forward if you go to additive manufacturing and from the geopolitical perspective and geoeconomic, you're kinda, you could write the imbalance as we see between exporters and importers. So you have a lot and then many other applications or implications that we have here for education, for getting people involved, for bottom up economy. You have a problem of labor. Are you gonna be reducing and eliminating a lot of labor? That's probably true in some ways but we're doing that already with the digital economy. That's where the jobs are not disappearing to China, they're disappearing to the digital economy. They're no longer needed. People are not doing things they used to do because they're done between machines, among machines. So that's a problem we're gonna have to face but maybe it creates whole new sectors and I think the final thing is we're gonna redesign what we make. Right now you're kinda making replacement parts. For example in the F-18, they used to have an air duct system that's about 16 pieces that are all kinda mushed together, metal that can manufacture to do very complex air flows and now they make one part that's designed to do exactly what it needs to do and no more. The thicknesses or whatever it is, you only have what you need and nothing else. So they redesigned that part but we're gonna start redesigning things themselves. The very end-use item might be, if you don't start with what can machine tools make for me and what do I design to the machine tools to have an outcome but what's the product I want to do? And then I have no limits on the way I might be able to design it. We're gonna have a whole new industries and new products so there's a potential for the additive manufacturing and perhaps associated technologies to be to the material world what the PC and the internet have been to the information world and of course the merging of the two is a big part of it so I mean I don't wanna go on and on here but to say that it's simply there's a real potential for very dramatic change in how we make things and with huge implications politically, geopolitically, economically, et cetera. So the short answer is yes. Yes. Maybe if we get our act together, right? Say that's concise. Now and you know of course a certain kind of large scale production has traditionally been driven in part by the literal needs of production. How to put a line together, how to put a supply chain together but also very much by the demands of finance that firms that have a certain size and a certain scale have advantages in being able to access bank lending to access capital markets and so even when we've seen the ability technologically to move to sort of smaller institutions it's not always possible to get the money you need to get things together and as I understand it at least that's very much what Kickstarter is supposed to be the answer to. Well, it's not the only answer. But yeah, absolutely. I think that one of the really important things that we've seen emerge out of people using Kickstarter and working with a community to create something is that scale is now not an issue. It can be very, very small and something that you make for just 10 people or it can be something you make for thousands of people and I think that freedom to not be limited by scale is really important. Can you tell us a little bit about how does that work? I mean, how does it get you out of those limits? Sure, so when you launch a project on Kickstarter you set a funding goal and if you reach that goal you collect the money and you can make the thing that you're trying to make. So if you need $5,000 to make something and 10 people come up with that $5,000 then you're gonna make as much as you can with that money for those people and as a reward you give them back the thing that you made and it's a very one-to-one relationship with the community that you're working with. Very direct. On the other hand, if the thing that you're trying to make ends up being something that lots of people want which we've seen happen a number of times all of a sudden the people that you're working with end up, that community ends up being thousands of people and all of a sudden you have thousands of one-to-one relationships and that is kind of how that goes from being something that's compact and small to also very large. I think we jump in here. I love Kickstarter, Kickstarter is awesome. Actually to talk about Etsy a little bit, Etsy as you said is a marketplace. We have about 40 million visitors a month and last year sellers on Etsy sold over 500 million items or 500 million dollars in items of various kinds and I think one of the coolest stories that's actually connects to Kickstarter is this jacket I'm wearing. You usually think of Etsy if you're familiar with Etsy and how many are familiar with Etsy. Great. A lot of times people think of Etsy as a craft site and there are indeed a lot of crafts sold on Etsy but the jacket I'm wearing and the shirt I'm wearing was actually made by a tailor who sells on Etsy and one of the things that's really exciting it's called Brooklyn Tailors. Daniel and his wife Brenna started this company on Etsy and created the brand Brooklyn Tailors on Etsy and they grew and they opened a brick and mortar store and just recently they launched a Kickstarter project to fund a fall line that they could create to actually pitch to retail stores. So I think when you look at that interplay between Etsy and Kickstarter you start to see that something like Brooklyn Tailors, two designers who had an idea suddenly have a really low barrier to start and not only can they start on Etsy and start making money they can also leverage Kickstarter to even grow their business even further and we're actually starting to see new ways to access capital at Etsy. So for example, there's a real gap between the Small Business Administration and the small entrepreneur on Etsy and just recently a company called Capital Access Network was funded by Excel which is a VC firm out on the West Coast. One of the investors in Facebook, one of the investors in Etsy and there's another company called Cabbage which starts with a K and what both of these companies are doing are basically doing advanced loans to Etsy sellers, eBay sellers and others. So I think we're in this really wonderful time where there's this wide array of sources for you to actually kind of live your life the way you wanna live it. No, I've been wanting to ask you about this though. I mean, if someone starts out selling things on Etsy and it becomes successful, is this typically, I mean, is that a situation in which they're gonna wind up outgrowing the platform or I mean, how does it work as a company presumably you want the vendors to be successful but too successful? Right, and I think currently Etsy is a really, really great way to start a business and we see people, what we call internally to Etsy, we see people graduate to other platforms, we see Daniel at Brooklyn Taylor starting his own shop, his own physical shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and we see them expanding but we're working on some things to help Etsy sellers throughout their whole life cycle and so but again, they have things like Kickstarter, they have these other capital sources to build out once they've gotten started on Etsy. And now Kickstarter, I mean in a traditional sort of fundraising model, you're getting money and then what you're promising to your investors, well they're investors and you're promising to give them a profit, give them money back and there's I guess regulatory barriers to doing that in this sort of crowdfunding way, is that the issue? Well, I mean by design, we didn't want people to be supporting creative projects with the idea that they're putting money in because they want money back. We always thought it would be much more rewarding and interesting an experience to support something because you feel like it deserves to exist and that's why we have a lot of art projects, we have a lot of, film is one of our, it is our biggest category and the amount of support that the film community has for creating a lot of films that may not be traditionally marketable but you see them succeeding wildly on Kickstarter, I think that's a huge testament to the fact that people really are not actually that interested in what they can get in return monetarily. It really is about the fact that they were able to be a part of making this film come alive and I think that's really amazing. It's a nice feeling and it's a hard one to be able to just go out in the world and get. And you know, I mean back to sort of the bigger picture, on this, what kinds of costs are involved in setting up 3D manufacturing, not 3D manufacturing, but these printing operations for real commercial purposes? I mean, what have you seen in your research? Well, what I understand from the people who do do this are surely people from Virginia Tech I work with who are really deeply into this is you have kind of bottom up and top down going on. I mean, you have MakerBot and all the experiments and then universities and people with more and more sophisticated and capable machines, but then you also have Boeing and General Motors and HP now has gone a big time into 3D printing to make the printers, but you have the big company, EADS makes Airbus. Right. And I just flew on one last night. So I have a little jet lag, but in any case they're working on printing wings to airplanes. And apparently 3% of the 757 was printed and more and more probably the 787. So the big manufacturers are seeing it's all problems are gonna make products that they couldn't make or make them better, make them cheaper, but for sort of small numbers of very critical parts like the F-18 air duct system. But so you have both going in both directions and I think you'll see the MakerBot experiment is going up the upscale, you know, they get more and more sophisticated. The printers will get cheaper but more capable presumably and they'll make products that start to sell and be substitutions for things that are being made a different way now. I think the way I would envision the process taking place is that you reach tipping points on any particular product or in an industry where the people who are printing the product actually make a better product in some way. It's either cheaper, it's designed in a way like that air duct system you just can't make with machine tools. For whatever reason, if you're gonna be competitive you're gonna have to use the same process and that'll kick it in maybe a particular industry or like I said, or a product line and you'll just start seeing this happen along the way. I mean, they're also printing human tissue, they're working on printing organs, replacement organs for human beings with your own tissue so it won't be rejected. I mean, it's going in so many different areas. In fact, one of the things I think about additive manufacturing is that it's not a single technology like the Telegraph which actually transformed the world totally. In fact, that was the first time in history the world was connected in real-time internet just the more shall we say sophisticated way of doing it. But it was one technology. Additive manufacturing is gonna be like not electricity exactly but something that sort of permeates the way people do all kinds of things. They're making medical devices, like I said, all kinds of human, your own heart could be printed, a new one. They take and get exact design of yours from MRI or imaging and then make a new one that they can put in to save your life. This is going on now. They're working Wake Forest people are working on this. So you're gonna see it in that field, you're gonna see it in making airplanes, you're gonna see it in the automotive industry, you're gonna see it in all different places and it's all additive manufacturing but it's not like only one technology. So how it will take place, I don't know but I think you'll see a bottom up and top down will be going on in all kinds of fields. It'll unleash the kind of creativity perhaps we saw in the IT field. So what does the Etsy economy look like? I mean, what's being sold? How big is it as a sort of share of the lives of the typical vendors? Yeah, so what I'm actually noticing and this is really exciting, like when you think about, when you hear Obama talking about jobs and that sort of thing, we were recently looking at some numbers at Etsy and if you look at like the top employers in the United States, I think Walmart's number one, Kelly Temp Services is number two and you look at Etsy, we have 800,000 sellers. If you counted us as an employer, we'd be the number three employer in the United States. Now the math isn't exactly right because some of those 800,000 are international but to kind of give you a sense of scale. I mean, what we're seeing is again, like using an example like Brooklyn Taylor's, Daniel who runs that shop is, people are seeing opportunities to build the life that they wanna build. So we talk to people who make a little bit of money on Etsy, on the website, sell at craft fairs and offline venues and make a little bit of money. They make a little bit of money on Airbnb and they basically piece their lives together. And I think what we're headed towards in the economy, I really like what Douglas Rushkoff has said and I'll probably get it wrong if I try to explain his whole theory but if you Google our jobs obsolete in Rushkoff, you can read his whole treatise on that. I think what we're seeing is like the whole idea of jobs doesn't really make that much sense anymore. And unfortunately from like a policy standpoint, we still have a lot of new deal era type institutions in place and a lot of people are getting jobs purely to get health insurance, not because they wanna have a job. And so when you ask how the Etsy economy fits into all that, Etsy and Kickstarter and all these other platforms, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, people with free time, even Mechanical Turk a long time ago, well it's still going, it seems old in my mind. But those are just platforms that allow people to make a living but not have a job and I think that's where the economy's headed. How about that from your perspective? That is very similar with Kickstarter. Everything on Kickstarter is project based and the idea isn't to just launch one thing and then that's the only thing you ever do. The idea is that you can do many things and as many times as you want and I think that kind of reflects this overall shift where you don't have to graduate with that degree and then be locked into this career for the next 50 years until you retire and get a clock to put on the mantle. And in fact we already know now that the workforce is shifting to the point where people really are switching every two or three years, often to things that they don't want to do because of the health insurance issue. But with Kickstarter we see a lot of people using the platform to pursue the side project and with the kind of success that some people are able to achieve that side project then becomes the main project and I'm assuming Etsy has very similar stories in that respect and I think this idea of the side project being your main project is such an amazing thing in this kind of new American dream sort of way. So I mean you were talking about jobs disappearing and you said not to China but sort of into the digital economy and they're talking about really jobs vanishing. You're talking about creation. It is a very interesting phenomenon. I would direct people to an article by Brian Arthur who wrote The Nature of Technology and Its Evolution. He's a brilliant economist. He wrote a piece for the McKinsey Quarterly in October on the second economy and he sort of makes the point. He moved from agricultural economy which had a huge, everybody was employed in basically and then he started industrial economy so people moved off the farm but there were jobs farmers. You got more productive in agriculture in the factories and then you have robots more and more taking over factory jobs but they're the service economy so they could move into the service economy and now you have the service economy so many of the jobs are being replaced by the digital economy, the second economy which he predicts to be as big as the real economy within 20 years and that means like if you go into an airport and you put your credit card into the machine it triggers 30 conversations with the TSA with the airport in London where you're gonna land with the plane for the weight distribution all these things that used to be handled by people talking to people are now just the machines talking to the machines and this is going on in all kinds of fields so those jobs are gone too and they didn't go to China they went into the digital economy so you're really transforming the economy if we get far more productive so you have a surplus that you can now have people making things a whole different jobs that you guys are helping create that will employ people or provide a living to them to sell to other people within the economy that won't be the traditional jobs because those are gonna be gone so we have to kind of reinvent what the job is as you said and then perhaps the shop class and soul craft is a part of the answer that getting back to making things as part of how we do things in life but the 3D printing particularly that's gonna lead to a lot of not necessarily the factory jobs you know the assembly line jobs but all kinds of innovative ways of doing things and I think well another economy is kind of growing up and you guys are part of it that's coming out of a place that nobody expected and I think the economists are probably the last people to figure it out because they never see disruptive change and their models are all linear but you guys are creating a whole different world and if we're smart we'll make a very successful one but it's gonna be very wrenching and I think you're right government is gonna have to change what it does I mean it's obvious you need healthcare that's portable that's it you know I mean our healthcare system couldn't you know you couldn't possibly design the worst one from scratch for how we deliver health through health insurance how we pay for it I mean it's just mind bogglingly stupid and it inhibits people I mean you can't sell your house right now and you can't change your job because you lose your healthcare and you know you limit labor mobility you limit all these job mobility and creativity so we have to find a solution to that to make it much more viable for people to say you know chuck this job I'm off gonna make my own thing and I can still have healthcare I can still have a pension you know this is big challenges that are beyond I mean what you're doing needs to stimulate and push this public policy debate to someplace else so we end up in a different place than neither party is really talking about right now as I understand it yeah I mean one of the most exciting organizations to me around and many of you may or may not heard of it is the Freelancers Union which is based in New York and what the Freelancers Union has done they're actually in the same neighborhood as Etsy is they you know Freelancers I believe are 30% of the population I think it's about 42 million people and what they've done is they've created a group healthcare plan for Freelancers and if you look at that block as a group it's like larger than like the teachers union and the you know doctors unions and the AFL-CIO and all of those and so it's really exciting to me to see an organization that's not it's taking kind of an old construct which is a union and not really representing sort of like labor against management because there is no management in that case they're sort of going back to the original idea of a union which is to provide a guild and provide benefits to workers so I'm I'm really excited I think they're they just got a grant to begin work they're offering healthcare in New York I think New Jersey's on the way and Oregon's on the way and you know if the Freelancers Union can do that all the reasons that you can't leave your job and you know uh... they go away and I think that's largely a policy issue that's exciting but you know I mean it at the same time you know we were talking about a sort of you know post post jobs lifestyle but but you guys all have jobs yes I suppose we do and the companies are full of people who have jobs uh... engineers and and sales people and and so forth and and I think maybe I don't know maybe they like it I mean I don't want to I don't we're no I don't think anyone's trying to get rid of the concept of jobs altogether and in fact you know we've seen some really interesting cases where uh... projects have been able to bring jobs back to certain areas uh... so we had a really successful design project to manufacture these phase change coffee uh... they're called coffee jewelies if I try to explain it scientifically I'm going to screw it up but you know it's this this you put in your coffee and it brings it to the perfect temperature uh... and they actually went to all over the u.s. trying to find a factory that could manufacture these coffee bean shaped stainless steel units and they had a really hard time uh... they really wanted to and you know a lot of factories had shut down and what ended up happening is that they found a factory in upstate new york that used to make silverware and they had shut down because there weren't enough orders and they were able to bring that factory back to life and I just think that sort of story is so fascinating and so incredible because we talk about you know all these manufacturing jobs leaving the u.s. when in fact there are fully functioning factories here with skilled labor skilled workers who know how to run these machines and they just need something to make I love that example this will be a little contradictory to saying jobs are going away I mean we're seeing the same thing with etsy we have a seller in alabama who realized that there are a lot of women in her community who are seamstresses and uh... you know the art was kind of going away but now there's a huge market for you know vintage and vintage inspired clothing so she created a clothing line and now she employs the seamstresses in her community so you're totally right like i think when you hear politicians talking about jobs being gone they're looking at like old factories that are sitting sort of fallow and you know general motors and kind of very centralized manufacturing but i think uh... what we're talking about here is that manufacturing isn't going away it's just decentralizing and uh... i think you know people are working in better conditions in that regard too i think so on that note maybe a good moment to decentralize the question asking uh... see what people have to say hello i'm elizabeth merritt i run the center for the future of museums for the american association of museums and i have a question for cindy of course museums have been in the business as non-profits for a hundred years of asking people for money and saying we do cool stuff give us money so i've been talking to them about Kickstarter and saying go look at this and they get freaked out they say wait a minute you're telling me people are asking people for money to do cool things and these are not non-profits they're just like people are for profit businesses how does this work it's a really good question i mean i've done it myself i've given money and yes i got something in return but what i got in return was in no way the equal of the value of what i gave what i think of is donating it was like getting the tote bag from pbs for making your pledge i was wondering has Kickstarter or anybody that you know done any research into this sort of philanthropic type psychology of people supporting projects that you know until there's regulatory reform they're not real stakeholders in it they're just doing supporting something they think is good um... we haven't done any formal research uh... everything we kind of know about how people behave on site at this point has been largely anecdotal just based on what we see and we know that more and more people are participating in this uh... more and more people are backing you know different types of projects of someone who loves film doesn't only back film projects they sometimes go often back in music project and we think that a lot of that has to do with your networks and who you know so that's usually when people back a project the first time it might be because it's their friend or it's a relative uh... and then you know eventually down the line it just ends up being it's an idea that they think is interesting so i don't have any you know percentages or data to to support you know any concrete statements at this point uh... but i do think this idea that you know you can use your money in a way that isn't just buying something that you can also make a statement with your purchase whether that's a vote of confidence to a friend or a vote of confidence that you know an important documentary about an issue you care about should be made i think uh... that is what we're seeing a lot in terms of how people are using the way they spend their money how does it work in legal terms i mean in in in terms of taxes if i'm producing a movie i'm raising money uh... you know i don't have an incorporated non-profit uh... like what what happens uh... and then payments is our payments processor and then you do get tax it's taxable income i think above twenty thousand dollars we have the same problem that's the uh... or challenge irs gets into everything uh... yeah i mean just this year uh... we started our sellers above a certain level twenty thousand dollars started getting ten ninety nine case so as as the platform had to educate sellers on what that meant because you know they have in many cases are just doing something they loved and didn't expect to hear from the irs so there's a new new new jobs for accounts yes coming up you there uh... in the in the purple back there where's the greatest uh... hi i'm susan garfinkel and i was asked to i'd treated this question a while ago and i was asked by the official tweeter uh... from uh... now to ask now although uh... it by question probably applies more to the whole afternoon then specifically the session except that it was about craft and i think because we have that's the representative here she asked me to ask it now but what i was trying to think about was and i come from a background of folklore where people have studied craft for a long time and craft and making things with your hands before the technology or our current round of technology has has been part of the mix and so i've been trying to think about what's new about the maker movement as opposed to earlier or different kinds of craft and and my earlier question that i'd posted was about some of the gender differences and not necessarily that i think there is a an inherent gender difference between man doing making and women doing craft let's say the rise of of the revival of knitting through ravelry or all the kinds of craft that we're seeing on etsy but i do think there is a cultural difference that's happening right now and i was trying to think about what the underlying issues about the differences between making and craft were and i one thought i had and i'd want to see if you have any thoughts is about perhaps with making uh... the final product is not necessarily supposed to or idealize for being handmade and singular uh... maybe making is on the way to try to come to a big concept and that in craft we still want that handmade small production final item so that's just a question and i the gendered aspect and i i hope this isn't a disappointing answer and we don't we don't actually consider you know the items on etsy we refer them as handmade but in our minds there's not a lot of distinction between craft and making and i think in my opinion i mean dale knows a lot about this uh... from his studies of the the the maker movement i think the internet has allowed people to communicate really quickly whereas uh... you know in the past things are handed down from generation to generation you had to you know wait eighty years for your grandmother to get old and tell you something and now you can just download it on the internet so i think you know someone someone took their eighty-year-old grandmothers uh... you know advice on making you know pickles and they put it on a blog and now that that is available to anyone so i think in some ways uh... and this is sort of popped into my head now i think you know the internet has allowed us to record this folklore in this and now it's searchable on google so if i wanted to leave this uh... leave this event and learn how to make my own bourbon in my house which sounds like a pretty good idea i would just i would be able to i would know how to do that by the end of the night whereas i wouldn't have to grow up in kentucky have three generations before me pass it down to each other etc etc on the gender on the gender issue i think uh... we hear this a lot of that scene the majority of the the sellers and the makers on etsy are women and the way i look at it is that we've created a platform that empowers women in a really unique way to start their own businesses so actually see that as a as a really positive thing like the seamstresses the seamstresses in alabama could just as easily you know be in a call center like answering random calls which is uh... i think a bit more dehumanizing than actually making a dress for someone so i see it as as uh... even though it's a return to tradition actually see it as more of empowering for women than anything else uh... so jeff howe long-time fellow dumbo white uh... long-time uh... uh... long-time member of freelancers union so i both have written about the freelance economy and sort of exemplified it because i spent twenty years in new york as a freelancer uh... and i guess i just want to say that freelancers union rocks and like i wouldn't have been able to like i don't know what we how we would have given birth to our kids if we have a freelancers union but at the same time i mean uh... you know the family plans thirteen hundred bucks so yeah a month so i just want you know it it's a work around like kind of a clue to you know the emerging freelance economy but it ain't a solution i mean until you know the larger systemic issues of health care costs are dressed there are no solutions right now and you know i there's so many great ideas on this panel and believe me i you know we furnished our new house through etsy so i mean i love you guys but you know i just want to throw that out that like we've got such a long way to go before we start unlike being able to support the the post job economy health care front you know is is unusually uh... vibrant in people's eyes but but this is in fact selling we've had major legislation on recently uh... but i wonder i mean are there are there other aspects of public policy you know that are that are similar to that but that haven't been even on the political agenda where you know people uh... find it hard to get by without bigger institutions behind i mean i'll jump in i think we're still at a stage like i've had conversations with uh... with u.s senators about this sort of thing i think we're still at a stage where like the internet has been around for twenty years but the people are making policy and passing laws still don't understand it yes uh... you know and and an example i want to mention names i was talking to a senator who uh... didn't know when i said airbnb is like turned his aid and said what's what's that and i think uh... you know the knowledge isn't there yet so like i i less worry about specific policy implications and more generally about the lack of education in the political realm and like how do we get that education in there and how do we get it in there quickly because there's just not understanding and i mean what about the financial system and this is something that's very tied in you know with with the government with the regulatory framework uh... something that that you guys are deeply involved with but you know only in a slightly idiosyncratic way i mean do we have that the framework that we need honestly i don't know if i can answer that question you know i mean i know there's the legislation that alama's been talking about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding and allowing uh... investment online which is specifically something that we don't do uh... and you know like i i think it's an interesting conversation for people to consider as an option for small businesses and it i don't know if it'll be a solution uh... but even the very idea that we're that the government is thinking about technology in that way seems like a big step forward uh... that there's enough understanding there that okay we could harness this in a kind of delocalized and uh... right hi my name is angelica dasa met the center for social media at american university uh... and my community is uh... social issue documentary filmmakers and we're makers in every sense of the world it's do-it-yourself everything so my question is how are these model how are these models uh... sustainable when our and product is uh... social change and social good uh... you know i've got stuff from at sea i've run a kickstarter campaign uh... but you know i raise five thousand dollars to go out into the field and make a film and then i come back and i still need another fifty thousand to finish it and that's not even beginning to cover cost of living uh... and you know ultimately we're trying to figure out how how all of these do-it-yourself methods and strategies uh... can bring us into the market i don't know that's too hard to me is that all the cost of doing this is dropped precipitously i mean the maker bought for seventeen hundred fifty dollars or the cost of doing digital video versus the old you know go back and film and you couldn't even think of making a film thirty forty years ago probably on the one hand you have all these tools that are that bring the cost way down and that we can't find the funding to do it anyway and and there's something wrong with that picture because we have the capability now to do what you couldn't even dream to do you know ten twenty twenty years ago so i don't know the answer to it but i think we have the potential is there to do these things at a very low reasonable costs so how do we pull that pull that off you know at least with projects and kickstarter it often is working with a number of different sources you know so you're working with a non-profit and you're also working with funds that you raise yourself and you've got private investors as well and it's often all these different sources that come together to make something happen uh... and to think of any one sources being the single solution is generally not gonna it's not going to work because there's limited resources and i feel like that's kind of what's happening in the creative space especially since i have a book coming out next week i can't i can't resist plugging it but you know i mean one of the large sort of fixed cost elements in people's lives and a lot of people's businesses is the cost of real estate and physical space and this is an area where uh... it's not that we haven't seen technological progress in building buildings but there are lots of other kinds of limitations the stock of of physical space that people can inhabit and when you have this sort of asymmetrical movements costs that the remaining scarcities become uh... very problematic in people's lives and and that's health care but i but i think it's also it's also housing uh... i think probably got time for for another another question here my name is alex al i'm a researcher for bellwether education partners what i've heard today is that what has driven the maker movement partially is that they like various technologies have lowered the barriers to entry to gaining control of your own destiny whether it's the inform whether it's the internet for information or three printing for manufacturing capital from kickstarter at sea finding a market uh... i was wondering if there's a certain missing piece in terms of other barriers to entry to helping people gain control over their actually think one of the one of the barriers is just sort of uh... people's attention when i think about the film maker back here it's you know the more uh... the more pieces of media that people are subjected to the harder it is to get people to pay attention to your media so you know i would say you know one of the biggest challenge is if you're an etsy seller and we have many many successful etsy sellers you know marketing and and uh... having people notice you versus all the other things in their lives so uh... it's a long way of saying i think we're still we're still in a world where like the one uh... resources not fungible is time and so uh... i think that expresses itself in markets in terms of attention speaking of time we are we're about out of it here and we're open tomorrow time is scarce and and and you've seized the moment thank you thank you to the panelist and and for the great questions